Today, host side applications (e.g. antivirus software) use an operating system application programming interface (API) to read in data (e.g. malware definition data) from storage to detect malware. Additionally, other storage specific commands can be used to read, write, and otherwise manage stored data. For example, vendor specific commands, SMART Command Transport (SCT), negative logical block addresses (LBA), etc., can be used to process stored data. These methods can be subverted by malware to give wrong information to a data requester. In addition, there is no provision for configuring the methods to provide application specific protection. Furthermore, data that is stored can be attacked by malware and may be copied or altered.